Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Bryher
-
Standard Name: Bryher
Birth Name: Annie Winifred Ellerman
Self-constructed Name: Bryher
Indexed Name: A. W. Ellerman
Indexed Name: Winifred Bryher
Indexed Name: W. Bryher
Nickname: Dolly
Nickname: Boy
In considering the paucity of credit given to Bryher for her patronage of the influential Contact Press
, critic Jayne Marek
describes her as an invisible woman.
Marek, Jayne E. Women Editing Modernism: "Little" Magazines & Literary History. University Press of Kentucky.
116
Bryher is even less recognized as a writer than a patron: most of her texts are now out of print and have received little critical attention. Her novels, poems, memoirs, and criticism, together spanning much of the twentieth century, form a significant contribution to the development of Anglo-American modernism, particularly through their French and Imagist influences, and their explorations of topics including women's education, gender mutability, psychoanalysis, and film technology.
Paul Valéry
asked SB
to translate his essay Littérature; it was later published in Bryher
's Life and Letters Today, under the signature of Sylvia Beach
and the Author.
Fitch, Noel Riley. Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. W. W. Norton.
333
Beach, Sylvia. Shakespeare and Company. Harcourt, Brace.
160
Publishing
H. D.
Between 1935 and 1950 HD had available as an outlet for her writing Life and Letters To-Day, the new magazine which Bryher
established through a merger of Life and Letters with The London Mercury...
Publishing
Dorothy Richardson
Having begun writing poetry in mid-1923, Richardson was initially reluctant to share her poems with even her intimates: for instance with Bryher, who was a close friend and sometimes a creative confidante to H. D.
HD's film writing of the 1930s went along with the actual making of films. Together with Bryher
, she helped to set up Pool Films or POOL
, whose productions included Wingbeat, Foothills...
Material Conditions of Writing
H. D.
H. D.
's aesthetic manifesto, Notes on Thought and Vision, written in July 1919 when she and Bryher
visited the Isles of Scilly, was posthumously published with the date of 1982.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Boughn, Michael. H.D.: A Bibliography 1905-1990. University Press of Virginia.
75
Literary responses
Violet Hunt
VH
's biography was warmly received both formally and informally. H. D.
(Hilda Doolittle
) wrote to Hunt from Switzerland on 30 September 1932, imagining [h]ow happy the book must make you! The style...
Intertextuality and Influence
Dorothy Richardson
Though DR
did not meet her future friend and supporter Bryher
until several months after the publication of Revolving Lights in early 1923, critics have noted many points of thematic and structural similarity between Richardson's...
Health
H. D.
Not long after this, at the urging of Bryher
, she met with therapist Hanns Sachs
for psychoanalysis in Berlin. Bryher had also undergone psychoanalysis with Sachs. He diagnosed HD as having a mother...
Health
Dorothy Richardson
Macmillan was an American who had intended to go into the priesthood, but left an Episcopal seminary to come to England when he found himself unable to continue his vocation. By the time DR
went...
Health
H. D.
Already suffering from anaemia and meningitis, H. D.
began to be convinced that World War Three had actually begun. Bryher
moved her to the Klinik Kusnacht
in Zurich, Switzerland.
Friedman, Susan Stanford. “’Remembering Shakespeare Always, But Remembering Him Differently’: H.D.’s By Avon River”. Sagetrieb, Vol.
2
, No. 2, pp. 45-70.
53
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
45
Health
H. D.
The father this time was Bryher
's second husband, Kenneth Macpherson
, with whom HD had been having an affair since 1926, and whom, some months before this event, she had allowed to adopt her...
Friends, Associates
H. D.
HD's estrangement from Pound
continued for years after the end of the Second World War. Then, despite the disapproval of friends such as Bryher
and Sylvia Beach
, she renewed contact with him in 1960...
Friends, Associates
Marianne Moore
MM
corresponded with T. S. Eliot
from 1921 until the year before his death. She was a friend of H. D.
and of Bryher
, and her editors believe that every one of her five...
Friends, Associates
Margiad Evans
A young poet whom she calls B—, a descendant of Percy Shelley
(and therefore presumably of Mary Shelley
too), whom she had known since his boyhood, moved from his own cottage to stay with ME
